Shape of the Blue Jays: Cease, Piñango, Woods Richardson

Welcome to Shape of the Blue Jays, my column where I dig into Statcast numbers to analyze recent pitch shape and swing shape trends for Toronto Blue Jays players and discuss how they have impacted their performance. Click here to read the last edition.

Quick Hits: New Statcast Drop

• We've talked ad nauseam at this point about Vladimir Guerrero Jr.'s power outage this season. However, Statcast just released leaderboards for a series of new metrics that show bat position at intercept earlier this week. These stats include miss distance, vertical and horizontal bat position, and timing.
• While most of the early content that MLB has posted in relation to these leaderboards has to do with pitchers, and early analysis shows there isn't as much correlation between a hitter's bat position and timing and overall performance as you might think, this new data uncovers a side of Guerrero's story that the public hasn't had access to until now.
• It shows that his timing isn't a whole lot different from the past couple seasons, nor is he getting tied up or flailing at the ball more than usual. However, the vertical position of his bat has changed for the worse. He's swinging under fastballs 28% of the time, up from 22% last year. Against breaking balls in 2025, he was swinging under the ball 12% of the time, which has gone up to 19% this year. Against off-speed pitches, that number has gone from 7% to 13%.
• For all the flack Guerrero gets for hitting too many groundballs, he's running the highest popup rate of his career. The balls in the air just haven't been as well-hit as in years past too. The Blue Jays have already had access to this data for a while now, but now fans at large can further isolate the root cause of what has been a puzzling season for #27.

Dylan Cease

Toronto's marquee free agent signing returned to the mound on Tuesday after a minimal stay on the IL and was nothing short of spectacular (6 IP, 1 ER, 3 H, 11 K, 1 BB). Dylan Cease got 29 swings and misses on the evening, the most in any big-league game since Tarik Skubal notched 32 on May 9 of last year. It's just the third time anyone has done that since 2024. Eight of those whiffs came on his new changeup, which generated nine total swings. That's an 89% miss rate! Since Philadelphia went with three strong lefties in the first four slots of their lineup (Schwarber, Harper, Marsh), it was an appropriate time to lean on that pitch. It was the second-highest single-game changeup usage we've seen from Cease on the year.

I maintain a somewhat subjective stat derived from MLB's play-by-play data to evaluate pitch tunneling by calculating the standard deviation of pitch position in space at 150 milliseconds after release, or roughly the point where the hitter has to decide whether to swing. The lower the standard deviation, the more similar pitches appear mid-flight. On a per-start basis, Tuesday night was the best outing of Dylan Cease's fledgling Blue Jays tenure from a tunneling standpoint. When his command is there, and he's maximizing his arsenal, there are very few pitchers in the world that can claim to be more dangerous.

Yohendrick Piñango

Although he recently made another error in left field, Piñango's bat has made it nearly impossible to keep him out of the lineup for now. He's slashing .321/.345/.464 in June and hit four batted balls over 100 mph in the Phillies series alone, headlined by a 112-mph lefty-lefty double off the wall against a down-and-in sinker from Cristopher Sánchez, comfortably the best healthy pitcher on the planet until Skubal comes back this weekend. 

His batted ball profile isn't fully optimized, but it's still one of the best on this roster. His 90th-percentile and max exit velocities are second only to Guerrero's. Per Statcast, only Jesús Sánchez makes less weak contact. The launch angle of his hard-hit balls is averaging only 5°, and his average attack angle is only 1°, but he has the most bat speed relative to his swing length on the team.

Even though he chases and misses more than the average hitter, he has seen a higher percentage of pitches ahead in the count than anyone on the team besides Myles Straw (min. 100 PA), and no Blue Jay increases his bat speed more in hitter's counts than Piñango. The projection models at FanGraphs are low on Piñango the rest of the season (~85-95 wRC+), and they suspect his playing time will be wiped out once the team is healthier, but if he keeps hitting like this, that won't be the easiest decision to make.

Simeon Woods Richardson

I mentioned during my recent guest appearance on the Jays Centre podcast that Simeon Woods Richardson was due for a fundamental change of some sort after getting traded to Toronto, whether it be related to his release, repertoire, or something along those lines. He was getting clobbered in Minnesota, and neither his stuff nor location was where it needed to be. I was in the building for his bulk appearance on Monday night (4 IP, 0 R, 1 H, 3 K, 0 BB) and was surprised in the moment to see just how many changes were made in such a short amount of time since the deal.

Woods Richardson: release, velocity, spin, and movement, 2026 (Twins left, Blue Jays right; Baseball Scouting Lab)

He added about an inch and a half of carry to his fastball, which averaged 19.4" of iVB on Monday. He also killed nearly 5" of run on his splitter, something he started to do in his last few starts with the Twins to inconsistent effect. His gyro slider, which was averaging 86 mph, sat 88-89 in the first two innings of his appearance. He also slightly shifted his over-the-top release toward the first-base side of the rubber.

According to the Stuff+ model hosted on FanGraphs, his fastball was an above-average pitch in this game for the first time since June of last year. He was a tad lucky on the BABIP front, but the fact that Connor Seabold was DFA'd before him indicates the Blue Jays saw enough to keep him around for the time being. I'm quite curious as to the role Pete Walker and company played in this positive development for a young pitcher who needed something to break right.

All stats entering June 11, 2026.